Resurrected Writings About Autogynephilia

Quotations; Our Existential Dilemma; Spiritual Implications

By Anne A. Lawrence, M.D., Ph.D.

These excerpts from my early web essays have not appeared in any of my
published articles.

Readers who are seeking a general introduction to the topic
of autogynephilia are advised to begin with my article Becoming
What We Love.

Quotations

"It's been seven years, and y'know what? I still get a thrill when I look at
myself in the mirror and see girl, not boy."

– Kate Bornstein, The Seven Year Itch

"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic
within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions
upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the
deepest sense."

– Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Our Existential Dilemma

We autogynephiles must eventually confront the fact that the strongest
feelings we know are tied to fantasies of being someone we are not. The emotions and
desires that make us feel most alive seem as though they can never be actualized
or expressed. The love and pride we should feel for our own bodies are absent:
At worst, our bodies disgust us; at best, they are unsatisfactory and make us
long for something different. Our attempts at intimacy are undermined by the fact
that the selves we seem to be to others ar vastly different from our idealized
internal selves, which ache to be touched and loved and seen in the form we wish
them to have.

Our choices are unenviable. Trying to accommodate or compartmentalize our
paraphilia sometimes works, at least for a while. Many strategies are available,
and most of us try several. Crossdressing can be exciting, although it
provides little lasting comfort to those of us who desperately want female
bodies. Putting ourselves in all-male surroundings can temporarily facilitate
our denial or repression by removing the reminders of who we desire to be.
Throwing ourselves into our work, our hobbies, or our art provides satisfaction
of a kind and helps us forget that which stirs us most. Habitual resort to fantasy
in sexual situations is tempting, since it provides us with a brief respite
from our unhappy reality. But continual retreat into fantasy inevitably leads
to shame. It also precludes real connection to others and results in isolation,
emptiness, and despair. Still, many of us never even consider our other option,
transitioning; or, if we consider it, we do not go forward. We let our dreams
languish. That is the safe choice, the easy choice. It is the choice that lets
us keep our families, our possessions, and our reputations. If the price we pay
is constant longing or emotional deadness, we can at least console ourselves
that many others around us are paying the same price in their own way. The safe
choice is the choice I made for thirty years, and it would have been frighteningly
easy to have kept on making that same choice for thirty more.

But, thanks to medical technology and our time in history, we autogynephiles
do have another choice. We can honor our strongest feelings by essentially
rebuilding our lives around our paraphilia. It is our peculiar blessing that
we are able do so: Most paraphilias do not really permit this option. The
practical problems are, of course, huge. If we try to live as women, we risk
losing everything: our friends, our jobs, our families and our reputations.
The discrepancy between the bodies we can construct and the bodies we desire
is frequently a source of disappointment. But the greatest problem we face is
that we must create our womanhood from the ground up. To make our transitions
work, we must try to become women, or the best facsimile we can create. It is
much like learning a second language as an adult: difficult, time-consuming,
and often frustrating. But it has to be done. It is the labor of a lifetime,
and although we may become fluent in our second language, we rarely lose our
accents or pass as native speakers. But if we persist, we earn—at least
in my opinion—the right to call ourselves women.

Although our losses are often great, the rewards of our efforts are many.
The most obvious of these is that we can give expression to our most intense
feelings: We get to move through life feeling truly alive. Part of this is,
undeniably, the palpable sexual frisson we feel when we see our own images
or when someone treats us as the women we have always wished to be. Part of it
is the satisfaction of knowing that we have actively created our lives and
have not been mere passive victims of a fate we did not choose. And beyond
this, we get to live in the world as social women, which is its own reward.
Many of us find that this is better and richer than we ever could have dreamed.
It becomes our entrance ticket to true humanity. It is so good that it becomes
easy for us to forget the path by which we came. Some of us seemingly do forget.

So that is our choice: to live safe, respectable lives and lose our souls,
or to honor our strongest feelings and risk losing everything else, in pursuit
of self-made womanhood. That is our existential dilemma.

Spiritual Implications

I want to share a few thoughts about the spiritual implications
of Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
wrote: "The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen
our evil as what is best in us."

Nietzsche's observation is directly relevant to our individual responses to
the autogynephilic eroticism that, for many of us, lies at the core of our
transsexual desire. One of the negative consequences of our Judeo-Christian
heritage is our tendency to see anything sexual as evil, degraded, and unworthy.
Other high cultures have taken a more balanced view of life. The Greeks, whom
Nietzsche revered, understood the importance of expressing and integrating both
the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of life. Many non-Western cultures have
also understood that sexual desire is the wellspring of our creativity and
our emotional and physical vitality. They have understood that sexuality
can be our most direct pathway to transcendence and to the spiritual
dimensions of life.

There has been an unfortunate tendency to see Blanchard's theory of
autogynephilia as pathologizing or degrading the transsexual experience.
I don't see it that way at all. We have grown up hearing that our sexual
desires are evil and unworthy, and many of us have come to believe it.
But I believe, with Nietzsche, that to live fulfilling and authentic lives
as transsexual women, we must be willing to rechristen our sexual desire as
that which is best and most profoundly human within us. We must honor our
sexual desire as that which moves us most, as that which makes us feel most
truly alive.

We need make no apology for deciding to rebuild our lives around the
most powerful feelings we know. I think it is an act of existential courage
to honor our deepest feelings by giving them a central place in our lives.
By transitioning to live as women, we can give tangible expression to our
sexual feelings—feelings that many of us have tried too long to suppress
and deny. And, although our paths can be challenging, the benefits in terms
of vitality and inner peace can be profound.

Although I usually write about transsexuality as a physician and a
scientist, I can also appreciate and embrace the views of authors like
Rachel Pollack and Susan Stryker, who write about the transsexual journey from
a more spiritual perspective. To me, the erotic desire at the core of
autogynephilic transsexualism seems like just another aspect of what Pollack
called the "divine force" that leads us to abandon ourselves to our bodies'
desire, and what Stryker referred to as the "enlivening power" of our
identification with Nature's dark, creative chaos.

When we recognize and honor the autogynephilic feelings within ourselves,
we do not declare ourselves sick or debased. Rather, we affirm that a life built
on passion and authenticity is truly a life worth living.